Upcoming. Has the new Essential Characters been pushed back to 2016? It looks like it, from what Knights’ Archive has discovered. Making room for Episode VII characters? They also spotted the first Rebels tie-ins, which are coming in August 2014 from Disney Press.

i don’t think the Essential Characters postponement is so that it can include Ep VII stuff. they could add Ep VII stuff and still have it come out in 2015 to be timely with Ep VII.

more likely, the schedule for 2015 might have a lot of Ep VII-focused SW nonfic books, (Art of.. Making of.. )and so they pushed this one back again to space out the schedule. I wonder if also DK might be doing some related books, akin to their Character Encyclopedias.

but yeah, the most recent characters guide (New Essential Guide to Chars) was out to promote Attack of the Clones and NJO.

You can’t ignore that the sequels are bound to wreck some pretty major havoc on something like Characters. Pushing it back that far probably means a huge rework.

And the EpVII stuff won’t start coming out until a month or so before the movie in 2015, while the 2014 cupboard is very bare at the moment. Yeah, they’re not talking, but at this point it’s pretty clear that everything with a lot of post-ROTJ stuff isn’t going anywhere, and presumably that would include Characters. (Which certainly can be reworked, something we really can’t say about novels like Sword of the Jedi yet.) My guess is that the only ‘announced’ thing that doesn’t have a date yet that’s actually likely to come out is the Hearns book.

I wonder when we’ll hear something about the EU decision Lucasfilm has to make in the near future (i.e. the next 15 months ;-)). If I remember correctly – and I probably don’t – they said that they were still in the middle of it back at CE2.
I also wonder how they’ll break it to us. If they declare the old stuff to be obsolete, they might want to start the new stuff off with a Zahn novel to calm everyone down. If they retcon everything, they may need even more than that (i.e. a Kevin J. Anderson trilogy :D).
Exciting times. :-)

Oh, right, I ignored forgot. ;-)
Still, if it turns out that they need to sell us on a new EU, they will need to give us some kind of lollipop, and nothing says lollipop like a good old-fashioned Zahn novel. :-)

Anderson has historically been a very polarizing author. It’s not ’97 anymore and he’s more or less irrelevant to SW these days, but I still think his books are the very bottom of the EU barrel: Not just for being bad (though they are pretty bad, IMO) but for a lot of things they established that got built up on. Hambly and McIntyre get a lot of crap, but their long-term influence was minimal.

I’ve never understood the love for those anthologies, but that could be my complete lack of interest in their content. And it’s been long-established that the reason they haven’t done any more is that the sales just weren’t there to support them.

As for the EU as whole, well: Prepare to be infuriated and hope it gets written off as an AU. Writing’s on the wall.

Believe it or not, Children of the Jedi is one of my favorite stand-alones. But nowhere near as good as The Zahn.

Planet of Twilight was pretty bad (actually right now I’m on p. 269). The whole “Dzym-or-whatever-his-name-is is a giant bug thing is…weird.

I see why others dislike the Jedi Academy Trilogy, and Daala is barely more than a cardboard cutout with a voice box (she supposedly impressed Tarkin with her “tactical genius” but can’t even capture Mon Cal?”). But I actually like the character of Kyp Durron (and do not, as your hysterically funny Death Challenge poem states, find him “too insipid to live.”)